Black Tiger port (OCS/ECS)

[Solo Kazuki]

Originally Posted by chadderack

AGA is sort of my fallback. I don't want to charge off in that direction just yet; pushing around 6 bitplanes would give us pretty much all the colors we need (with a few modifications) but we also want full music and perfect frame rate. A lot to ask of OCS/ECS.

I don't get this "fallback" thing, You can make both OCS/ECS and AGA versions. Let's say it right - it's impossible make 1:1 version for OCS/ECS, but for AGA... well, maybe with minimal reductions in worst case, but it's possible.
Edit: I had in past PPC without graphic card. MAME was working slow, but games like Black Dragon/Black Tiger were looking fine without visible reduction on AGA. So I have base to telling it's possible to do 1:1 version.

[Master484]

Here is a quick test that I made:



16 colors. 32 colors still possible.

Although that's just a fast test, the colors aren't even in OCS color space, and most likely things can be improved further. I just quickly made up the palette based on a gut feeling, and the end result seems OK so I decided to post it.

And I think the sprites will look good in this too, although I didn't test them.

The US Gold Black Tiger Amiga port is indeed horrendous, a strong contender for the both the "slowest scrolling routine of the 80'ies" and the "most shameful Amiga arcade port ever". So a better conversion would certainly be most welcome.

But unfortunately I can't help you with the graphics much more than this, because currently I'm busy making graphics for a game project of my own, and I have to concentrate on that.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Master484

The US Gold Black Tiger Amiga port is indeed horrendous, a strong contender for the both the "slowest scrolling routine of the 80'ies" and the "most shameful Amiga arcade port ever". So a better conversion would certainly be most welcome.

The only thing BT amiga and atari shown was that a decent graphics color reduction to 16 was possible, not optimal but decent - freeing the player sprite colors from it will make it look better

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by Master484

Here is a quick test that I made:



16 colors. 32 colors still possible.

Although that's just a fast test, the colors aren't even in OCS color space, and most likely things can be improved further. I just quickly made up the palette based on a gut feeling, and the end result seems OK so I decided to post it.

And I think the sprites will look good in this too, although I didn't test them.

The US Gold Black Tiger Amiga port is indeed horrendous, a strong contender for the both the "slowest scrolling routine of the 80'ies" and the "most shameful Amiga arcade port ever". So a better conversion would certainly be most welcome.

But unfortunately I can't help you with the graphics much more than this, because currently I'm busy making graphics for a game project of my own, and I have to concentrate on that.

This is exactly the type of palette i would love to see on my amiga 500 !

[chadderack]

Originally Posted by Master484

Here is a quick test that I made:



16 colors. 32 colors still possible.

Really nice job! And 16 colors!

The US Gold Black Tiger Amiga port is indeed horrendous, a strong contender for the both the "slowest scrolling routine of the 80'ies" and the "most shameful Amiga arcade port ever". So a better conversion would certainly be most welcome.

But unfortunately I can't help you with the graphics much more than this, because currently I'm busy making graphics for a game project of my own, and I have to concentrate on that.

Thank you for your quick palette test and feedback, and good luck on your project too!

Originally Posted by saimon69

The only thing BT amiga and atari shown was that a decent graphics color reduction to 16 was possible, not optimal but decent - freeing the player sprite colors from it will make it look better

As I remember, the game *looked* OK (I haven't played the US Gold version in about 20 years) but the scrolling was a nightmare and there was no music. At least I couldn't enable music and have the game continue to function.

...

I'm actually making headway with my palette areas idea. This would allow us to use the full arcade palette, if it can be engineered. It does rely on some fairly tricky copper waits. I'll do some tests and see what happens. This is the engineering phase.... when the real creativity occurs.

There are options

[chadderack]

Making some progress here... seems my plan has coalesced into:

• Get the palette for most of the level and keep it to 32 colors or less
• For the poison plants, use a vertical split to manage a color change either by adding a bitplane or swapping colors. Done for both locations of the poison plants
• Use a separate copper and palette for both the wise man's shop and the dungeon

Here's a look at the initial tiles... with the final colors as they will look on screen.



I'll map the main palette (32 colors) to the entire tilemap file in Deluxe Paint/IFFConverter... the old man/dungeon/poison plant tiles will look bad. But those tiles will map to their correct palettes when the time comes for them to be displayed.

Doing it this way it looks like the converted tilemap IFF file for Level 01 will be 24576 bytes (6000h)... not bad.

I might also put the enemies tiles into the same file (eventually) and (of course) use the same 32 color palette (or modify it slightly) so that the enemies and tiles will look good together.

[Mixel]

Thanks so much for your in depth updates they’re really inspirational!

It’s looks like you’re going down a sensible route here.

[Frog]

it looks pretty nice !
i'm a bit surprise by initiale tiles... it's pretty small (quite good for memory consumption)

[jotd]

this looks great! now try to map level 1 with those tiles with your scrolling. That is going to be a killer!

[skyzoo73]

To me the graphics tiles already look like those of the arcade!

[dlfrsilver]

Beautiful job !!!

[VincentGR]

Ok, this looks amazing!

[Silverstreak]

Yes, this is really looking nice.

[skyzoo73]

It would be nice to rediscover the habit of using ham images, as an intro to the most beautiful Amiga games ... what do you think?

I did a little test with hamconverter:

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by skyzoo73

It would be nice to rediscover the habit of using ham images, as an intro to the most beautiful Amiga games ... what do you think?

I did a little test with hamconverter:

Attachment 73662

I see that good as loading screen ^^ plus, with the right dithering and reduction can be just a EHB picture thanks to limited colors usage

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by skyzoo73

It would be nice to rediscover the habit of using ham images, as an intro to the most beautiful Amiga games ... what do you think?

I did a little test with hamconverter:

Attachment 73662

awesome picture quality !

[nikosidis]

This game is very nice. Hope you will succeed.
Abyss recently did Tinyus
http://www.indieretronews.com/2021/0...s-port-of.html

That game is OCS but with some slowdowns on standard A500.
Therefore A1200 specs. is recommended. That good thing about this is that using OCS
the game will run on all Amigas and there are plenty of cheap accelerators for A500, A600.

I will be very impressed if you can make this game run perfect, 50fps on standard A500.

[chadderack]

Progress. 5 bitplanes. Ignore the plants (which haven't had their vertical split trick applied which will switch the color) and also ignore the strip on the left of the screen.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jot3m6myt3hxuxn/5bp.mp4?dl=0

[jotd]

that project has reached the point where I'm sure you're going to complete it.

Great work!

[chadderack]

Originally Posted by jotd

that project has reached the point where I'm sure you're going to complete it.

Great work!

Still quite a few challenges.

Current issues:

• The map is now 48 tiles high; it used to be 16. If you scroll down past position Y=E0, the screen split doesn't work. It pauses until you hit Y=$100 and then it resumes
  
• 32 colors means no "black" color sprite to hide the left edge. I need to combine two colors to pick up another black color for that strip. Either that, or find another way to hide the screen fill column on the left.
• The object/enemy palettes need to coordinate with the 32 existing colors, or there will be some awfully funky (mostly awful) looking enemies.

Considering these, I may need to re-compute the palette again and combine/move colors for a while. Good news is 5 bitplanes mostly works.